Muelleria 35: 43–93 The origins of botanic gardens and their relation to plant science, with special reference to horticultural botany and cultivated plant taxonomy Roger Spencer and Rob Cross Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, Birdwood Avenue, Melbourne, Victoria 3004, Australia; [email protected] On ne connait pas complètement une science tant Abstract qu’on n’en sait pas l’histoire This paper explores the origin and Cours de Philosophie Positive 1835; Auguste Comte (1798–1857) development of botanic gardens including consideration of the beginnings of plant cultivation and Introduction domestication and the emergence of botanical science. We suggest that Botanic gardens are versatile institutions whose objectives depend on the origins, history and functions of both local circumstances, and the more general social, economic and modern botanic gardens pre-date environmental needs and concerns of the day. As they are diverse and the European Renaissance and that they reflect the social, economic evolving institutions, the provision of a precise formal definition would and environmental circumstances of be both contentious and misleadingly prescriptive. their times. The oldest existing botanic gardens date back to the early modern period, to the educational physic gardens associated with the medical faculties of universities in 16th-century Renaissance Italy. Today’s botanic gardens have little to do with these early and highly specialised medicinal gardens whose narrow academic and scientific goals and formal designs have subsequently taken on additional economic, environmental, aesthetic and other values. Collectively the world’s botanical gardens have come to reflect the many-sided relationship between humans and plants and, though science provides a common underlying theme, they may emphasise other objectives and social values. © Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria 20162017 ISSN: 0077-1813 (print) · ISSN: 2204-2032 (online) Spencer and Cross Our approach is to examine the evolving family Revolution. The earliest of these centres occurred in of shared characteristics that have, over time, drawn the Ancient Near East dating back about 12,000 years, botanic gardens into a global community. We see probably a product of the conducive climate and today’s botanic gardens as having much in common growing conditions in this region after the last Ice Age with the ornamental and utilitarian gardens of and the presence of both animals and plants amenable ancient civilisations and the first truly scientific garden to domestication, although the precise reasons are established in ancient Athens. The characteristics disputed (Rindos 1986; Smith 1986; Diamond 1997; associated with today’s botanic gardens include: public Tudge 2003). In Europe the Agricultural Revolution plant displays labelled and thematically arranged in gradually spread from the Ancient Near East, taking designed landscapes; the presence of some kind of about 8000 years to reach the British Isles in the north- botanical institution; the emphasis on a diversity of west (Cunliffe 2013). plants grown for their utility, beauty, rarity, curiosity Worldwide it appears that there were many different and scientific value; and the connection with plant kinds of proto-farming leading to the fields and pastures knowledge and education. Many of these factors, and that we are familiar with today (Holmes 2015). In New more, relate to general garden history that pre-dates the Guinea, for example, a form of shifting agriculture was European Renaissance. practised while in Australia food plants were managed To understand today’s cultural landscapes in general, in many different ways (Clarke 2007): there was the and botanic gardens in particular, we must go back carefully managed burning of natural vegetation to to the very beginnings of plant cultivation and the flush out animals and induce succulent new shoots, origins of domesticated plants. What were the social now known as ‘firestick farming’ (Jones 1969; Gammage forces that gave rise to our present-day configuration of 2011), while wild cereals were sometimes harvested in urban and rural space, the familiar everyday cultivated situ (Gerritsen 2008) and yams and other plants were surroundings of gardens, parks and fields? propagated and managed in a horticulture-like manner (Gott 2002). Prehistory Agriculture provides the big-picture backdrop to the history of botanic gardens not only because it The beginnings of plant cultivation now underpins all human existence as a source of and domestication sustenance, but because it produced the surplus wealth We know that there must have been a time, many that facilitated the urbanisation and civilisation from millennia ago, when tending plants became more which botanic gardens would emerge. than the simple husbandry of plants growing naturally Agriculture fed the body but less certain is the way in the wild. In all likelihood discarded pips and other that plants nourished the ‘soul’. What were the attitudes plant remnants left over from feasting around camp and beliefs of our ancestors and how did these influence fires sprouted into food plants that could be harvested their plant management? when sites were revisited. Plants could be grown easily So far as we know, societies in prehistory enough from seed, transplants or cuttings in special attributed nature with human characteristics; it was areas dedicated to their cultivation. Then, over long anthropomorphised, and the spiritual world was one periods of time, the process of continuous selection of of temporal continuity, extending from past to present plants with desirable characteristics gave rise to new and future through ancestors, the living and the afterlife. kinds of plants with combinations of characters not Underlying the human relationship to plants would found in their wild ancestors. have been innate and universal factors: our fascination The large-scale domestication of animals and plants with their beauty, novelty, utility and the way they that we call agriculture did not arise from a single region teased our intellectual curiosity. But the plant world of and tradition. Archaeological evidence suggests that our ancestors would have been far richer in symbolism, agriculture arose independently in more than ten major mystery and religious meaning than that of today. centres across the world over a period spanning about Plant knowledge was gained by determining 6000 years and referred to as the Neolithic Agricultural which plants were safe to eat, which had medicinal 44 Vol 35 Origins of botanic gardens properties, which affected the mind, when and where Human evolution they grew, as well as their relationship to cultural The natural forces of evolutionary selection that had beliefs. This knowledge entailed precise observation, forged human bodies and minds were being replaced experimentation and the transmission of cumulative by human-derived selective forces: humans had moved knowledge down the generations as rudimentary out of their environment of evolutionary origin into an science; empirical knowledge whose detail was likely environment of their own making. From this time on, only mastered by special individuals (such as a shaman changes in human social circumstances would, for the or medicine man). most part, be a consequence of rapid cultural change, Hunter-gatherers lived in small nomadic bands rather than slow biological change. within nature. They were a part of nature itself, much Paradoxically, though humans were the as non-human primates are a part of nature today; domesticators, it is as though they were themselves they depended on unpredictable weather and other being domesticated. And insofar as agricultural crops uncertain environmental factors to secure their seasonal were determining lifestyles, humans were being sources of food. Their fate, they believed, depended on domesticated by plants. The coevolution of humans and spiritual forces from an unseen world and it was probably plants had entered a new phase. this spiritual realm that dictated plant practices. Perhaps special attention was given to those plants growing in Urbanisation – physical and mental space areas set aside for ceremony and ritual, especially areas City dwellers now lived behind walls that both associated with ancestors and the dead – maybe around separated and protected them from what lay beyond. a burial mound, sacred tree, sacred grove, spring or a The distinction between nature and culture (as civic shrine of some kind (Hooke 2010; Nielsen 2013; Turner space) had been literally set in stone. Though nature 2013). Simple shrines dedicated to local deities are was accessible outside city walls, plant cultivation in found the world over. urban surroundings would become more and more the We must look to early human settlements to tell us more way of engaging with nature and the natural seasonal about the developmental path that led to today’s cultivated biological rhythm of growth, maturation, death, decay spaces and the particular plant interests that would later and renewal. become the special concerns of botanic gardens. Even in the earliest phases of urbanisation we can The Neolithic Revolution and recognise at least seven kinds of special human spaces ancient civilisations – all potentially containing cultivated plants and all with counterparts today. These are structural or bounded Agriculture and early civilisation spaces that suggest values as well as functions: • space for domesticated plants and animals as grazing Living